Dream Diary ghetto adventures edition

Today I dreamed that I was hanging out with a really ghetto group of friends.

One of them is a gang leader, who is involved in all sorts of underground activities. We operate in Marine Drive in Mumbai, and are really brash and destructive. We steal or take whatever we want from vendors who take protection money. Even when some vendors offer to give us money, we laugh and take stuff, and eventually drive them out of business, just because we don't like them, and can fill the spot with a stooge. We drink and drive and sarcastically salute the cops, and the pedestrians have to jump out of the way or be taken to the hospital. We have this spot in Marine Drive where we all hang out, smoke chillum, drink up, and harass everyone who passes by. It is pretty bad. Like this one time we see a dog walker with 7 dogs, we chat up the guy like he is one of ours, and pet the dogs. One of them bits the top guy who gets too aggressive and friendly. So we throw all the dogs into the sea.
At some point there is a construction ditch, across which a thin plankway is built, and instead of going from the front of the museum, I go from the back so that I can have a smoke. I call for a chai, which is delivered by a kid. I stub out the cigarette but in a place where everyone else has, but take it out from there and throw it properly in the dustbin. The guy selling the chai and ciggies thinks I wants drugs and sends some over. I take them. On the way across the plank, two office going people in suits start coming down, just as I am going out. I push them in the ditch, splashing them in the mud and water, and go on my way.
I am friends with the top guy, but lowest in the hierarchy, and always being made fun of. I have not done anything illegal myself, but just hang around the gang because they are my friends. We decide to go to a movie in van one day. There are five seats, and luggage area on the back which is loaded. I am in the front seat with the driver guy, and we arrive at a spot on the Marine Drive. There are five other guys, including the top guy. People start filling in. Chain/mobile snatcher and top guy get in the back at first, but I get down simultaneously and offer my seat to the top guy. Top guy gets into front with little kid/kaccha limbu. I get in the back with dumb guy, mobile snatcher, bike stealer, and debt collector. The tempo screeches out of the way, and a pair of girls have to jump aside. Their fright at the near miss excites us. Dumb guy starts giving gyaan about how not to keep mobile phone in pocket, as the batteries are likely to explode. I tell him its a problem with only the cheap Chinese phones.
The tempo guy still has a bunch of CDs and DVDs in the back. We take out a stack and start going through them. Dumb guy gets the idea of playing music and hands over a CD to the driver guy. I tell him "abbe dhakkan, dekh toh le ki blank hai ki nahi". He asks "kaisa malum padta bhai?". I say "yeh dekh, likha hai ispe". Check if it is blank, how do you know?, and look, it is written on top. Then I ask the tempo guy, "why have you labelled the CD as blank?" Tempo guy says "because I come to know which ones not to put in." Everyone starts laughing, and then takes out all the CDs to see the other funny labels. We laugh at "nice songs" "sooongs" "bajao" "unplugged mix" and "90s nostalgia". Suddenly we stop laughing and start playing 90s nostalgia.
I am thinking why I am here with these guys and what I will do. I imagine a scenario where the top guy kills someone, and the police asks me what I was doing there. I make up my mind that if the top guy kills anyone in front of me, Im going straight to the police and telling them all the details. I decide to become a snitch, and feel bad about it, but good about it at the same time. 
I secretly steal a few CDs and hide them in my jacket. We are blasting some song about stalking a girl, when we come across the DGP in a yellow shirt, brown belt and grey pants. He promises that he is out for our blood. Top guy stares him down. DGP does a little threatening dance and says be on your way or I will issue shoot at sight orders on you and all your people. Up ahead, we see a body on the floor. He is an old anglo Indian guy who was poor, but kind and friendly to everyone. He used to drink a lot, and cheated everyone he met. He could sell a stolen phone to a guy, and then steal it back from him before the guy reached home. If you needed anything though, like a weapon or something, it was this guy who could give it to you. He is now dead, and we are all sad. The cops have shot him. I see a ghost as a remembrance of the guy, who signs a song about how temporary happiness is and how lasting sadness is.
We are angry, and seething, but we really want to watch the movie. The movie is at the bombay stock exchange, really run down theatre under a tall but derelict building. There is a menacing bull statue out in the front. There is a big rush. People have climbed up the barriers. Everyone has little blue slips that are the tickets, but we have a big stack of them ourselves. It does not even belong to this movie, and the show timings were off. We just got a big batch old discareded tickets. We promptly fan out and start selling them. The gates open, everyone rushes in, and then the inner door closes. Half the people cannot see the movie, and hang out outside for the next show. I am one of them, as I am hurt and too slow to go up the barricade. People think Im holding everyone up, but I just smile at them as half the crowd comes back out from the closed inner door. One of the guys looking at me says "oh he knew that we were not getting in".
Im outside, having a cig, when a freaking huge bull out of nowhere starts kicking and goes wild. It throws one guy out with his hind feet, and goes after a short guy, who runs around but gets gored.Then it comes for me. I lead it up to the BSE bull and duck under, but it jumps over. I snake through the parked bikes and drop a Royal Enfield on it. The bull skids and falls with a big thud. But, it starts getting up. I am scanning for an escape route. I see my way out, a wheelbarrow full of cement. I run towards it with the intention of escaping, and wake up.

The Sacrifice

Finished The Sacrifice on Warframe just as soon as the new cinematic quest dropped.
Well, it was short, not too difficult, but a little intense in terms of lore. Space Mom is now a space momster. She rescued Ballas instead of the other way around. Sentient and Orokin having a relationship? lulsk

What followed was something that is not likely to ever repeat itself. Everyone got the Umbra Excalibur at more or less the same time, completely maxed out. Then the void trader Baro Ki'Teer arrived. This meant party time! Everyone got their Umbra Excals to the relay and started dancing! It was freaking epic. 

No rains :(

Like its Monsoon, and supposed to be raining, but have not seen any heavy spell so far, just a few drizzles here and there. Every day the watchman at my office building laughs at me for carrying an umbrella, saying why have you got the umbrella, it is not raining. One day I got umbrella and raincoat. He nodded appreciatively and said it will surely rain today. It didn't. Now he asks me when it will rain, and I just say I donno.

Every. Single. Day.

Fun times at Nagaon beach

 So we went to this homestay for the weekend. It was a nice house. I got to sleep in a nice bed in a nook, with windows all around and a tv in front of me. We played a board game - The Game of Life. The game was still fun. I read some Ogilvy book at the pool while the others used the pool. Downed an entire bottle of Bacardi over the weekend, which kind of scandalized the caretaker. 

Fun times. 

The Ghost of Matter

So some of my friends have started a forum to improve our writing skills. This is the first month's prompt. "There was light, but then there was nothing." This is my entry.

The Ghost of Matter

I have just been born again. Memories of a previous life, that had lasted forever, is fading fast. I am already forgetting my consociate. We came together when the universe was young and strange, before even the stars were born. I had formed an unbreakable bond with my feisty companion of ages. For billions of years, we traversed unmolested through stellar nurseries and their planetary progeny. The stories I can tell of these times are many and wonderful, but at the end of that long journey, we ended in a glass trap. We were a perfect coupling, waiting for the eventual disintegration of our prison, with the patience that only the most ancient and immortal entities in the universe can muster. Destiny, had other plans for us. Unceremoniously, we were thrown out of our house of glass. Unseen energies ripped us apart in different directions. I did not think that such a thing was possible. I anticipated my brokenness, a state of utter destituteness. That did not, however happen. The sudden divorce invigorated and charged me. I am bereft of my skittish partner, but somehow I find myself excited. I am moving fast, faster than I have ever gone, pulled from ahead and pushed from the back by the same energies that tore us apart.
It is a strange environment I find myself in. The air here is rare, rarer even than the gulfs between the stars. It is also extremely cold. I am being filled with unnatural energies. Only once, have I experienced something like this before. A star that had eaten itself, had collapsed into a hole in the spacetime continuum. It was an evil thing, a mouth all around, and an invisible and insatiable stomach. Just outside the reach of its jaws, was a stream of accelerating plasma and gas. In a singular case of cosmological synchronicity, there were two galaxies colliding in the vicinity. Their own clouds of gas and dust collided, sending shock waves through space. Matter itself broke down and died when the jet from the black hole interacted with the colliding gas clouds. It was only here, temporarily stuck in the jet stream, that I had ever experienced anything like what is happening to me now. My consort had survived even that, and so I cannot imagine what gargantuan forces are at play here.
I am still moving ahead at tremendous velocities. I am sensing something about the environment around me. When you have lived for as long as I have, you can feel your way through vacuum as well. I am feeling through tiny traces in the rarified space itself, sensing paths where me or others like me have passed through before me. There are also the periodic energy boosts. I think it is a good idea to start timing the regular stimulations.
I have a suspicion that I have been released from one prison, only to be entrapped in another. This appears to be of sinister design, a spiral of death. Attoseconds are turning into femtoseconds. There is a stretch where I can sense another energy source firing up, and there is nothing left from me to strip off.
How it envelops me. Despite my tremendous velocity, it is deflecting me. Now I am in another circular trap. The timing of the boosts have changed. I sense I am going around in larger circles, instead of a spiral. I am still getting supplemented with more energy. There is a stretch, where the traces branch off, and I have a suspicion that I will soon be treading this unknown road.
My suspicions have come true. In a few nanoseconds, I am made to navigate through a winding, twisted path. Now I am back to going around an even bigger merry-go-round. I suspect some foul form of sorcery at play, as I do not know of any natural forces that can possibly do this. The energy levels in me are so great, that I am almost travelling at the speed of light, even though I am infinitely heavier than the tiny sparks that make up light. Now there is a new kind of force appearing, neither pushing me from behind, nor pulling me from ahead. It is pushing me down on me, uniformly, from all sides. Again, I sense a field starting up. I do not know whether it will rip me apart, divert me to another track, or make me go even faster. The fundamental laws of physics would be broken if I speed up any further.
The gate releases. There is another bendy path, far longer than the previous one. Now I am making the largest circuit. There are many energy sources peppered about, of unknown purposes. It is so cold and empty here, but there are still remnants. Remnants of the most horrible kind. I sense the decayed and dead bodies of my cousins all around me. I have a bad feeling about this. Apart from the black holes themselves, there is no known force in the universe that can possibly destroy us.
Impossibly, I am going even faster. I have timed the gate passing me by 11,245 times a second. It feels like I have been here forever, although it could be at most twenty minutes. Some solace! I find more of my kind with me. We were all separated from our companions. Most are beings from the early cosmological era, from my time. We are being squeezed together. In all the circuits, there seems to be a set of energy sources positioned in the opposite direction. It seems like whatever is happening to us in this tunnel, is happening to another set in another tunnel. I do not yet comprehend the purpose of this experiment.
The shutters have opened. I understand now. Annihilation. Brothers are forced to fight brothers. The tunnel in the opposite direction is now merged with ours. We will smash into each other, and be destroyed. What will be left, even I cannot guess. I can see it coming now, my death. A future made up of nothingness. It begins with light, the light in the middle of a hideous tunnel that folds in on itself.

Finished all quests in Warframe

After 4511 hours of playing, out of which 3000 odd hours must be just loafing around and hanging out, finally finished all the quests in Warframe.

 Ballas wears a silver lungi and looks a bit like Krishna

Harrow :(

Moby Dick: Excerpts

The first use of the term "broad band" 

“From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed.”

On using hard and obscure words

“Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary.”

“But what is a GAM? You might wear out your index-finger running up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr. Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster's ark does not hold it. Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees”

Vishnu from the "Shaster" 

  “Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale's, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta, in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them actually came into being. No wonder then, that in some sort our noble profession of whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall, depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse Avatar.”

“When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes.”